The 1960s were a decade of transformation and trauma for Washington. The March on Washington in 1963 brought a quarter million people to the Mall. JFK’s assassination brought the city to a standstill. And the 1968 riots that followed Dr. King’s murder left scars across entire neighborhoods that would take decades to heal.
For 53 years, 2440 18th Street NW was Millie and Al’s. Al Shapiro bought Bobbie’s Restaurant in 1963, kept the name of his bartender girlfriend, and gave Adams Morgan Jell-o shots, a dancing skeleton, and its longest-running dive bar.
Charles Curtis had Bassett Furniture build a 19.5-foot mahogany chair outside his Anacostia showroom in 1959. A year later, model Lynn Arnold moved into a glass house on top of it for 42 days. The chair is still there.
On a 46-acre bluff over the Potomac in McLean, a developer paid $650,000 for Jackie Kennedy’s childhood home and drew up three 17-story apartment towers, and then the Interior Secretary next door started making phone calls.
Walk into the Everlane store at 3259 M Street NW today, all blond wood and folded denim, and you are standing in what used to be the rowdiest room in Georgetown. For about a quarter of a century, this three-story building was the Crazy Horse, a beer-and-boogie nightclub the neighborhood spent years trying to shut … Read more
Inside Dan’s Cafe at 2315 18th Street NW: the windowless 1911 building, the immigrant Dan family, and the six decades Clinnie ‘Dickie’ Dickens ran one of D.C.’s oldest dive bars.
For 43 years, Tom Sarris’ Orleans House held the corner of Wilson and Lynn in Rosslyn, complete with iron balconies and a steamboat salad bar.
Forty-five years of Georgetown’s loudest room. The Bayou opened in 1953, closed in 1998, and put U2, Dave Matthews, and a whole DC scene through its doors.
In 1966 a teenager from Chevy Chase reached through the window of a Rolling Stones equipment van behind Washington Coliseum and walked off with Brian Jones’s custom electric dulcimer. The recovery involved a letter to the Evening Star, a Bentley from the British Embassy, and a follow-up Beatles caper. The same barrel-vaulted shed had hosted the Beatles’ first American concert two years earlier.
On January 31, 1958, the Evening Star started calling Dallas O. Williams “the Bad Man of Swampoodle.” The nickname stuck through five trials, three vacated convictions, and a 1961 double murder that exposed the broken machinery of DC’s insanity defense.
